How Buying Online Businesses Propelled Jaryd Krause into the Online Course Industry

Jeremy Deighan
Hello, everyone, thanks for tuning in. Today we have Jaryd Krause with Buying Online Businesses. And he teaches people how to buy websites that are already making money and how to grow and scale them. So how are you doing today, Jaryd?

Jaryd Krause
Really good. Thank you so much for having me on Jeremy.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, we're excited to have you and excited to dive deep into your business. So how did you get started with online business in the first place? Let's go ahead and hear a little bit about your story and where you've come from.

Jaryd Krause
Originally, I'm a plumber. So I've been plumbing for about 10 years and since I was still at school, and I ended up really hating it. I worked my way up on the job site, become a site supervisor and all that sort of stuff, but I was working big hours and I was just disgusted in the lifestyle. So I turned to a lot of drinking and not a healthy lifestyle at all.

And so I decided to go traveling, I quit my job, go traveling and then come home broke. And then save up money go traveling again. And on one of my trips, I was away for about almost a year and a half. And I realized that I didn't want to go back to my life and not just my job, I like I didn't want to go back to what I was, how I was living. And so I worked out I needed to go. And I was living in Egypt at the time. I was teaching people to scuba dive. I was a dive master. And I jumped on the internet and I realized I wanted to keep traveling.

So I jumped on the internet and I typed in how to travel the world and make money online. And that's just snowballed into a big massive thing where I started a travel blog and started website businesses and realized that, it's really hard to start a website business. Like it's actually, back then it was even easier. Now it's even harder, because there's so much competition. You need, you know, people say it's cheap, easy and free and can be done overnight, but the reality is 90% of startups fail. I struggled through that period.

And I came across that stat and then I realized, well if 90% of these startups fail, why don't I go and buy a website business that's past that 90% failure rate? And just run it?

Because I knew how to run businesses I knew a lot about business. Just wasn't great as starting them. And then I typed in and found some places I could go buy website businesses and different website brokers popped up and I bought 1, 2, 3.. people started asking me to teach them how to do it. And then that's how I created my course and, and yes, started helping people replace their income.

Jeremy Deighan
Very awesome. So what was the first website, if you don't mind sharing, what was the first website you ended up purchasing?

Jaryd Krause
The first website was a website where people could purchase a monthly fee or an annual fee to get access to a database of wholesalers or suppliers which is what we call dropshippers. And there was just a big database of different dropshippers around The States. And then I, you know, I bought that one, started blogging, grew it's SEO a little bit, changed a few things around and yeah, got a good return back on it. It was a good start.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome. Yeah, that's great. I've looked into doing that myself, because I've created niche sites. And like, like you said, a lot of people fail because it takes, you know, a long time, even a new site might take, you know, six months to nine months even to start ranking in Google. And so this is a really interesting business that I like to hear about, because you can, sounds like you can bypass a lot of that startup phase and get right into a website that's already producing.

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, correct. I mean, it's still you know, people visit...

There's both sides of the coin, and I suggest if somebody really loves a niche, and they really have something they're passionate about, and they want to be in business for 10 years or more than it's certainly worth starting a business around that because you're gonna love it, you're gonna get fulfillment enjoyment out of it. And you're in it for the long haul. That's the key thing is the macro goals.

But a lot of people come to me Jeremy and they say, Jaryd, I want to, I just want to replace my income. I just want to make money online. And most people come to the internet simply to make money online. And I feel that they just don't have the gusto to carry through a startup phase, all the knowledge. And that's why it was my perception is it's just better to, to purchase something that's already working.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that's awesome. So you, you go in, you purchased a couple different sites. You saw a good return on your investment. Everything was going good. And then at, you said, people were asking you, you know how you were doing this? At what point did you decide that you wanted to start teaching what you were doing and create a course?

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, so I got invited to a business retreat in Thailand, and I wasn't a speaker or anything like that. I was just an attendee. And already owned three, two, I think I had two businesses at the time. And I bought them and scaled them up and I got a quite a good return on one of them. I think I got 100% return on investment in seven months from my second business.

And at that retreat, it went for four days and we were out and about doing fun things, activities and then in the seminar room, and a lot of people started you know, you get to know people and network. And everybody after hearing my story, and learning a bit about what I was doing is like, kind of started asking me to jump up on stage and, and start teaching. And I thought, well, it's not really my stage, it's not really my time and I was quite young at the time as well and I wasn't as competent as I am now in teaching.

And so then I started keep, like I kept traveling off to that for another, you know, year and a lot of people after hearing my story, they just wanted me to just sit down with them and teach them how to do it. And so I, on my travels, I was surfing in Mexico, and I stayed there for, I think it was about six months. And I just designed this course on how to buy website businesses. And I decided when I get home, I'll give it to people for free to test it out as a beta. And that's that's what really made me want to start teaching is because I really saw a need that people wanted this.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that's, that sounds great, because that's where a lot of people fail is they go out and they try to create the course first, something that they have interest in, but they don't find out if people actually want that information. So it sounds like you did a good job of making sure that it was something people were really asking for and wanting before you went out and made it.

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, that's the hard thing, isn't it? And this is the same with a startup. Well, you know, creating a course is starting a business too and you can definitely do it and I suggest if you're going to do it, be really passionate about and be in it for a long time, and you're going to have more success, but also really see if there's a market there for what you're going to create before you go away and just create something that people may not purchase. That's a great point. Jeremy.

Jeremy Deighan
Correct. So you you decided to sit down and create this course. What was that process like in the very beginning, when you, when you went from you had absolutely nothing to an idea and you decided, Okay, I want to sit down and I want to create this course. What, what was it like? How did you go about that? What were you feeling and how did you end up creating that course?

Jaryd Krause
Well, I was really excited to just teach everybody what I knew. And I just didn't know how to structure it. I didn't know how to do it. And it got frustrating with me. I got frustrated with myself trying to reverse engineer my process to find websites, do due diligence, make sure they're good investments and buy them and all that sort of stuff.

And then I stopped for a while and, I think it might of been a week and just thought on it and came back to something I learned about, you know, creating a book and writing a book and creating a skeleton for that book. And that's what I decided to do with my, the structure of the course that I created. Is I went out and thought, I need X amount of modules, or I just need some modules. And then within each module, I need a lesson. And then I just built a skeleton. And then once I had the skeleton, it was very simple to just go away and create the content because I was just focusing, and focus is the key word here for everybody listening. I was just focusing particularly on what people needed to know about that specific lesson or about that thing that I was teaching in each lesson.

So I just went and I created lesson by lesson each day. And then I went through and I edited it, and then edited it again, and I recorded it and yeah, I started to piece it together. So instead of trying to get this big grand idea, putting it to paper, where I got a little frustrated with myself at the start, because I needed to reverse engineer how I was going to teach this. Because I had it all in my head. And I know a lot of people listening and they're like, they've got this information and know what they've got this sequence their patent, their process on how they do things. But they need to reverse engineer and the skeleton is just a perfect way to to get it out.

Jeremy Deighan
Oh, yes, definitely. I found a little trick too that I use sometimes when I've created courses in the past. And sometimes I won't even start at the beginning of the course, I will just pick the thing I think I can talk about the easiest, you know, or the most and I'll just start there. So sometimes I'll start, I'll start creating in the middle of a course, just because it'll get the, you know, the brain working and the juices flowing. So that's a little trick that I found sometimes I'll just you know, pick, pick the thing that interests me the most and get started, because most people have a, have a problem getting started I think, wouldn't you say?

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, and that's a great, that's a great thing to mention is getting those creative juices flowing. Like, it's the same with writing and creating a course, is that writers say that you just need to write something or anything and it doesn't need to make sense. It doesn't need to be great. If you just start doing it, then you can like, definitely those creative juices start flowing, get a bit more creative. And then it will start to make sense over time. Even if you know you do your first two to three lessons and it's just like, I don't look good on camera or this doesn't sound right. Then you can just go through and edit it. At least you've got something there, you've got something to work with.

Jeremy Deighan
That's right. So you create, you create the skeleton, you start creating the course and building it out. And then you mentioned that you are going to release it for free in the beginning. So how did that process go? Where did you host the course first of all? And then once you decided on who you were going to host it with, what made you decide to put it out for free versus putting, you know, putting a price amount on it?

Jaryd Krause
This is a great question. The reason I decided to do it for free was to see if it was a) gonna work for other people, and b) to get some case studies and to better sell my, my course. How I did it was, and I hosted it over Google Hangouts, and I just basically recorded all of the lessons and I was going to use that, the recordings with the attendees to have them as my actual lessons. And the quality wasn't as what I would have hoped or liked and it was a bit mumbled and jumbled around and a bit sloppy and messy.

So I tried to, what I did instead is I wrote everything out word for word. And I don't suggest everybody does this, but I wrote everything out word for word. And then I read it off the computer into the camera, and created slides and did this lesson separately.

Now, why do we give it for free? Well, I just wanted to see if it was gonna work. And I wanted to get some case studies and I wanted to get some quick wins.

Now, this, if I was gonna do it again, I'd do it very differently. And the reason being is because when you give somebody something for free, they don't value it.

It's like for example, if I said, Jeremy, there's this book that I just read, it's the most amazing book and it helped me make, you know, a million dollars just yesterday, and if you read this, I guarantee you're going to get the exact same result, like I guarantee it and I give it to you for free. Now, if I said you Jeremy, I've got this book, it cost, you know, $350 or $500. It has the ability to make you five, a million dollars in just one day, like I did just yesterday. Now, this is the best book I've ever read in my whole life, which, like which version you're going to say that's more valuable, the one that has money attached to it rather than as free? You know, like, if I'm giving something for free, people just don't value it.

So I gave this away and people didn't do the work. They did a little bit of the work, they just didn't go the whole way. And then when I started charging for it, people held themselves accountable. People did the work. They needed to justify the spend of their money with them doing the work and getting results. And that's what I'd do differently if I was to create another course again, well, I'm always creating a new course and stuff like that, but like, I wouldn't ever give it away for free.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I've found that myself is this is, this is the great pricing debate that people have, you know, how much do I charge for my course $12 or $40 or $200 or thousand dollars. And if you think about what you just said, the higher amount that you charge for your course, you might not get as many people, but I feel like the people that you get are going to be way more dedicated because as you stated, they have more invested into that course.

Jaryd Krause
I totally agree is, and I've played with different prices on my courses as well like, with more done for you stuff or done with you stuff by me and one on one coaching and the more I charge, the you know, the better results people get. And so, it's not like hey, go away and charge, you know, you know, $15,000 for your course and the first course that you make and, and go down that route. It's, you need to be comfortable charging that amount I believe, and know the value of the course as well. And yeah, I mean, it's, the pricing debate is hard, but just you can't.. don't sell yourself, don't sell yourself short.

Jeremy Deighan
Right? Yeah, I like that. So you, you create this course, you do it on the Google Hangouts, you have some people who kind of do the work and some other people not so much. So what, what was the next step after that? What, you know, if you did this course, and you saw that you weren't getting amazing results, what made you want to keep moving forward with it?

Jaryd Krause
Because people are still asking me, and it just changed my life so much. And much like everybody else knowing that they want to help people, because what they know has changed their life as well. And I just had this feeling that it was gonna work and it needed to work and I was just so passionate about like, sharing it with people. And making sure I can help people not make mistakes. You know, I know there's a lot of people that were buying websites and, and making mistakes and buying lemons and, and really affecting them and putting them back further than where they would be when they first started.

So I just had this feeling deep down that I needed to keep going with it. And that's when I, I created it, made it really good. And I hired a mentor. And I, well a coach to help with, you know, selling it. And yeah, as soon as I started selling it, it just it went off. Obviously I learned a lot through marketing. In my first year I spent 30 grand on a, I had a business coach and then I had a marketing coach and spent 50 grand the first year just learning all of this stuff and continue learning. So, it's not just hey, create a course and you'll just be able to sell it quite easily. You do want to have that experience in, in marketing.

Jeremy Deighan
Right? And, you know, educating yourself, getting the coaching I mean, that is, that can take you miles what might take you, you know years to figure out. Someone like that can definitely help expedite that process. And I'm sure you know, paying, you know, for a coach that you probably followed every step of the way because it wasn't free coaching.

Jaryd Krause
Exactly.

And I laughed earlier just before because I was the guy, when I first typed in how to travel the world and make money online, I was the guy that was like, I'm gonna be a self made millionaire. And I look back now, in hindsight, there's no such thing as self made. Even if you learn something off the internet or this podcast you're listening to or a book or a free lesson, wherever it is. It's all regurgitated information that we learned from somewhere else. Nobody is self made.

I had this perception that a lot of entrepreneurs get and it really stopped me up, is that I needed to just go it alone, like I can do this alone. And I'm gonna be the self made person. And it's just the dumbest thing. And, and I look back now and I'll just go what, what was I thinking? I did this for years Jeremy, I didn't hire a coach, I didn't get any help. And I look at the most successful people in the world, like anybody that has any level of success whether it's a politician, you know, a business owner, athlete.. all have teams around them. Like not just one coach but they have like multiple, they have teams and so I'm like, eventually when I first hired my first coach, I got great results and I was just like, I'm just gonna build an army of like great people in my network to, to help me grow. And I think that's probably like, that may even be one of the biggest takeaways out of this podcast is just get people on your corner in your corner.

Jeremy Deighan
Yes, I, I definitely agree with that. I think we all feel that if you're starting out as a solo entrepreneur or startup, you definitely have that, you want to do everything yourself. I think some of it might come from, you know, money, you know, fears or what have you. Other parts of that come from pride, you know, I'm going to do this myself. And I'm going to do the graphics and create the website and do the videos and production and marketing. And like you said, the moment that you step out of that role and become more of a business person and entrepreneur or a leader, you realize that you don't have to do all of those processes. And there's a lot better people out there to do them for you and to help you and teach you along the way.

I personally myself agree with you that I have grown so much more when I started getting rid of those things that I don't need to be doing anymore or reaching out to coaches and mentors to help teach me things that I figured I'd just learn on my own. You can grow so much faster once you begin doing that. So, so you, so you've, you've got your course. You reach out, you get, you know, some coaching and some help. What, what did you do after that with the course? Did you stick it up on a new platform and, and how did you go about.. you know, you created the course, you refined it, you made it better. What did you do with it after that point?

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, I put it on a member's portal in OptimizePress within WordPress. And I sold that over the phone. I did phone sales actually. And sold it over the phone and I was working with people more one on one, one on one coaching and having the program and stuff like that. Just to hold people accountable. And I started building out a sales team, my marketing started going really good. And I was just, you know, doing phone sales. So it was.. people would do a booking call with us and you know, 15 minute booking call, and then I'd have an education call and then I'd have a sales call. So that'd be three touchpoints. Which helps, you know, build a relationship with people before they'd, you know, purchase and work with us.

Obviously, this is a higher ticket at the time. I was selling my course for a higher, as a high ticket item. And I think people like this, H, you know, high, HTC, which is high ticket closers. Started become a thing. Anyway. Yeah, I learned so much about sales and so much about marketing just through phone sales and building out a sales team. And, yeah, that's evolved. Now I don't do phone sales. Now I don't use OptimizePress. It's far more automated. I don't do anything. In terms of, you know, sales calls or, you know, trying to sell people into my course. It's very organic.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, yeah. And I definitely want to get into those steps. But before we do, how are you getting people to hear or find out about your course in those early days when you were doing the more high ticket coach, high ticket closing and courses. How, how were you getting people in there?

Jaryd Krause
I look back in hindsight and there's so many things that I'm looking back on this cringing at what I did. I was doing. I was doing direct response marketing. And so I was doing direct response ads to cold traffic on Facebook. And I would see one ad and I'd get them to book a call with me. All my sales training, and that's how I was getting people on through that, you know, the first booking call, prequalify people, and then those people would go, you know, portion of those people would go through and, and do an educational call and then do a sales call and then eventually work out to jumping into the program. So that was basically the process at the very start until it started to grow. And my team grew bigger and then things changed. I had to pivot because the Facebook algorithm changed. And yeah, it was, it wasn't working.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, so when you were doing those calls in the beginning, do you feel like those more personal one on one calls, the coaching kind of program that you were doing, do you think that it made your course better? Would you, is that something that you would recommend for someone in the beginning, so that they can help make their course better? Because it seems like you would be getting some direct feedback from the students that you could use to make your course better in the long run? Would you agree with that?

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, that's such a great point, is, is knowing who you're working with really helps because then you can get to not just to help make your course better, but to also help your marketing be better because you get to learn their wants, needs, fears, frustrations and desires at a deeper level. To a point where I would, the first sort of call I would have with somebody is I'd get them to go through a certain amount of lessons. Fill out their homework and get back to me and I'd schedule a call with them and I'd go through their goals and their guidelines on what business they want to buy and what their personal goals are as well.

And it really helped me know who I was marketing to. And I was marketing to tradies, who was you know, like plumbers and sparkies in Australia. And I just knew them so well because I was a plumber in Australia. But then I got to know that, them on a deeper level, because on the job site, you know, nobody talks about their personal stuff. And doing this, people would open up and just the connection of those who were in my community or in the group was a lot stronger because everybody had similar goals.

Everybody knew what they were. And we all were a big family and a big team and at one stage when I was doing weekly webinars and I'd scale them back, people's favorite time of the week was to jump on to those, those weekly webinars and catch up with everybody. See how everybody's going and learn the lesson of the week that I had to teach. It really became a pretty awesome family. Now, that just wasn't as scalable as I'd like, especially for myself, yeah, you know, when you do so much one on ones, when you get to a certain level, it starts depleting you and then you just can't give your best self to absolutely everybody, unfortunately.

Jeremy Deighan
Exactly, yes. So it's, it comes to a point where you just can't maintain any more and then it, it affects you physically, psychologically, physiologically. And then like you said, you're not, you're not really helping anyone at that point, because you just can't give that direct support.

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, you just don't fill your cup up. Like I'm huge on energy exchange. And you know, when you're just pouring your energy out to absolutely everybody, you become depleted, and then you know, you just, it's unhealthy. And then eventually it's not great for anybody in the transaction because you're just a zombie.

Jeremy Deighan
So, so you decide, okay, this, this isn't gonna, this isn't going to scale at the point that you're at now. We need to make a change. And you decide, like you mentioned earlier that you started to automate some of the processes. So tell us a little bit about how that went about.

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, it was, it's kind of a bittersweet time that I went through my business. Initially, I didn't pivot or change because of the, you know, how many clients I had. I was still working a lot, I had four people on my sales team and then I had a booking team and a marketer and all this, you know, build out quite an awesome team. I spent so much time on them. It was so good. And what really happened was, my Facebook ads weren't performing and we weren't making sales and, you know, expenses started to catch up. It's good that I had a lot of, you know, cash in the kitty. And you know, my Facebook ads just weren't working. They were getting shutting, shut down from Facebook. And I couldn't say what I wanted to do in my ads like you, we get heavily regulated on Facebook. Google's a different, or YouTube's a different story now.

They're quite good but I, yeah, I was getting regulated hard and I couldn't say what I wanted to in my ads and I couldn't get my message across the way I wanted to. And so I, I just stopped and realized I need to you know, get rid of my team. I need to do, not respect, not direct response advertising only to cold traffic. Because people had only one touchpoint before they got on the phone with me. You know, there's, there's with marketing now people are saying you need you know, anywhere from 12 up to 40 or more touchpoints before somebody purchases from you. And so I decided to start doing some content marketing, which is where I created my podcast. And then I'd sell, send people from my ads to my podcast. And they just get so much value and so much information. And they were, you know, so easy to close and so easy to bring them onto the, into the community into the, into the program and the course because I just built such a great relationship with them over that time, and it was just me talking over the over the podcast. And I think people forget or just don't understand that, that's your relationship building there. And so I really changed my approach to marketing and realized I just need to start building more or better relationships with more people. And so that's what I decided to do was I went all in, I got rid of my team, and I went all in podcasting and promoted the podcast and that was just harnessing great relationships with so many people.

And it doesn't have to be a podcast, it could be a YouTube channel, it could be a blog where people are still spending time on your stuff, on your knowledge, on your content. That's still relationship building. Doesn't matter the form of media. And then I just realized that I don't really need to do sales calls. People, I can just save my costs and say my stuff throughout my, my podcast and people will, you know, eventually want to just jump in and join and that's what started happening is the podcast became the tool. The podcast became the sales machine.

Obviously, I've got, now I do promote my podcast, and then put them through sequences of different advertising campaigns and email marketing campaigns and sales pages and all that sort of stuff. All stuff that I worked out after I decided to go all in on creating content and building relationships with people over, just get people into the program as quickly as possible.

Jeremy Deighan
Yeah, that's man, that's some great information. Thank you for that. Would, how long would you say that it took from the moment that you made the decision to change, to create the podcasts and you, because because, when you put something like a new podcast or a new YouTube channel out, it's gonna be hard to get traffic, you know, initially. So how long of a lull did you see between the time that you changed out the course and, and started going more content marketing? What timeframe were you looking at there?

Jaryd Krause
It was about two to three months.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, cool. Yeah. So not not too terribly long. So if anyone's listening and, it you know, now's the time to get started because...

Jaryd Krause
There is a caveat with that. Yeah, like so I had cash reserves. I always make sure that I keep cash reserves within my business to ensure that if I need, if something bad happens, I can pay myself a wage. I can pay all my expenses or stuff, whatever, and also grow the business a little bit as well. So I did put, I didn't put crazy amounts of money in, but I did promote it. I did promote heavily with organic and a little bit of ads. So yeah, somebody that's starting a YouTube channel or anything like that, as I suggest putting a little bit of money behind it as well. So you can be a short timeframe if you, if you are really dedicated to it.

Jeremy Deighan
So you were running ads from, you know, I guess Facebook to your podcast.

Jaryd Krause
Mm hmm.

Jeremy Deighan
Okay, awesome. Yeah, that's a great way to light a little fuel to the fire, add some fuel to the fire to get it, get it going quickly. So what does that program look like now? At the beginning, you mentioned you know, it was a more of a high ticket program. It was, it was coaching and more one on one. So how does that program look now?

Jaryd Krause
It's far cheaper now. It's, it's still very hands-on. So what it is, is people will pay a monthly fee. And they can cancel whenever they want. So it's 100 bucks a month. And they can cancel whenever they want. I, everyone that joins, I give them unlimited due diligence reviews. So it's quite tailored to my niche. So I give them, they submit businesses that have done due diligence on or businesses I've researched, right. And I review them, so I make sure they don't buy a lemon. And I'm pointing out things and pitfalls and red flags that they need to look out for. And that's, I can either choose to do that with them over Skype or Zoom. That's not a part of the package deal, that's just added bonus added value. And I love connecting with my community. A lot of the times I do, just do them, you know, in a Google Sheet and send it over to them, send it back to them.

And we have the community, we have a group where people are posting every single day asking questions. So the, the main value that they get, is they get direct access to me. So they can, they can email me, they can message me in my membership community in the portal. Also in our community group questions about absolutely anything; buying a business and growing a business. And I'm in there every day. So I'm answering questions every single day and there's very tailored and specific questions and, and great value so people walk away and like wow, like this is awesome.

So it's, it's still, it's still quite hands-on in the sense that I'm working with them directly, but I don't have to schedule time out, I don't have to do phone calls with them. And I don't you know, it's, it's on my time. And you know, I get back to everybody within 24 hours but I've got a life you know, I get to go surfing if I want however many days off, like last year, I went and traveled Europe for five weeks, and it's, it's the more people that I bring into the community, the more valuable it becomes because everybody else learns from one another.

Jeremy Deighan
Right.

Jaryd Krause
Yeah. And so its a self, self fulfilling course where people just join in, they learn from each other. I've got people that I have awesome friendship groups, now they've been friends for, you know, over a year outside of, they met through the community and they've bought businesses together and, and yeah, it's a really tight, niche family. And then I've just got the course where people log in, and they they can consume the course content.

Jeremy Deighan
That's awesome. That sounds like a really good strategy. And community is a great way to build the business because you are really helping more people and like you said, you just, that community aspect just brings so much more to the course itself. People in there might know things that you don't know that they can answer and help each other out and it's just, it's a wonderful thing. I always recommend anyone who creates a course should at least have some kind of community along with it to help, help those people out. Now, just real quick on the price, you said you reduced the price. And I know that might scare a lot of people, it probably might have freaked you out in the beginning. Did you see a major revenue drop? Or did you see your revenue go up? Because now more people were able to purchase it? What are your feelings about changing that price?

Jaryd Krause
Yeah, initially, there was a revenue drop, obviously. I was charging thousands and thousands of dollars. So you got to realize that it's a big change, you know, you know, a couple of thousand dollars for a program as opposed to 100 bucks a month, cancel whenever you want.

Obviously, yes, a lot more. It's a lot more scalable. So I don't spend much time on it. To be honest. It's you know, I'm always working on the business, not in the business and it's just so low barrier to entry. You know, people can join and be like, Oh, this isn't actually for me, and they can just leave after two months if they want or three months. And, you know, it's, it's a good tool for people that even after somebody buys a business, I, you know, I've got people that have bought business, they stay on and we help them grow them as well. So we've got people that stay for a while, and then people that leave, and those people that leave, they're so happy with leaving. Well not leaving, they're so happy with being a part of the community because they've bought a business, they've scouted a bit. And anybody that goes to them, you know, I'm all about long term and macro focus. Anybody goes to them and says, hey, how did you do this? I'm sure they're gonna refer them to me because it's 100 bucks a month. So low barrier to entry, and I'm just playing for scale rather than, and quantity.

And that's really when I took my, when I took my ego out of it, like obviously I wanted to build a great business and a big business and I wanted to make a lot of money, but when I put that behind me, is what I really got started for was the fulfillment of me helping and changing people's lives. And this is so low barrier to entry. I can just do this on a bigger scale, and it brings more fulfillment to me rather than just, hey, I'm putting way more cash in my pocket, then, you know, the work I need to do to put in to get it. The, the more I get out of the, I get more out of this business, in terms of fulfillment, then in terms of cash. I mean, it's a great business, earns good money. You know, fulfillment is really why I'm, I love it.

Jeremy Deighan
Right. That's amazing. So where do you see your course and your online business going from here?

Jaryd Krause
So I'm always looking at little tweaks. I've got the main, the main direction of is this, you know, if the podcast grows, the bigger the podcast grows, the bigger the community grows, and the course grows because it's just, it feeds the community really. Now there's a few things that I have in play, you know, adding smaller barriers to entry. So like having like a, I'm going to maybe create some. And I'm actually going to do that this week is create a individual lesson that I'll be selling. So people can just taste and test my work and at least login to the membership portal. It could be for 30 bucks just to get one little training, and then upsell into the course and then I'm going to be upselling into, at the end of this year, I'm bringing out my mastermind that I'll be doing and working with people more directly and more one on one. I am missing a little bit of the one on one approach. And that's a huge part of the fulfillment that I'm looking for in my business. So I will be bringing on a select few people who are in my community to a higher level mastermind and just help them buy businesses a lot quicker and scale them at a faster and better rate. I'll be adding that in.

On top of the community, obviously, there's a lot of people wanting to work with me and just give me money to go buy businesses for them. So I'm building out a fund where people can invest into a fund of a collection of businesses I'll be purchasing and growing and scaling with my team. But that's, you know, separate to the community. There's still people in the community that still want to buy one themselves and still want to invest with us, our fund, but yeah, that's that's kind of the direction it'll be taking over the next coming years.

Jeremy Deighan
Awesome. Well, Jaryd, I wish you the most success on your business. This has been some great information. And I just really appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing your experiences with everyone here. I got one final question for you. You know, someone out there right now is listening, and maybe they haven't even started that course. Or maybe they've got the course and it's just not gaining any traction and they don't know how to sell it. What is one just real good piece of advice that you could offer for these people out there who are listening right now.

Jaryd Krause
For a business to grow, there's the things that you really need to know, as an entrepreneur and growing a business is sales and marketing. So if you have a course, it's probably not the course that needs to be changed. I know that my course at the start was sloppy, and not what it is today. It's always going to change and you've always got to start somewhere. But the more people you get in, the more feedback you're gonna get on how to change it and how it's going to evolve. But to do that, first you need to understand sales and marketing and get really good at learning sales and marketing.

So my biggest advice for those who have already got a course and they're wanting to sell more of it is to just pay the cash to somebody who's already done this before. Already scaled, you know, a community. And learn how to do that from them. You don't need to go away and reinvent the wheel, you don't need to be the self made entrepreneur. And, and leave yourself in the dark and run around and make all the mistakes yourself. Somebody else has already done that. Just go away and work with somebody who can help you. And get this done in a lot quicker time. And you're gonna achieve a better ROI on doing that and having somebody help you then doing it yourself and in a shorter timeframe as well.

For those of you who haven't started a course and thinking about doing it, is don't put so much pressure on yourself. Have a bit of fun with it. You know, like what you said, Jeremy is, you know, just turn on the laptop and start typing out a lesson or recording one of the first lessons about something that you know, right, and then you can, you know, start to piece out a bit of a skeleton, and then just work at it, you know? Know, it's more about consistency in creating that course then having it be amazing because if you just start somewhere, then at least you got something to work with and adapt.

Jeremy Deighan
Mmm. That's wonderful advice. Thank you so much. We appreciate it. Where can other people find out more about you and your businesses?

Jaryd Krause
Yeah. If you just type my name into Google, Jaryd Krause, or any social platform, YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn, Jaryd Krause, or type in buying online businesses into Google or buyingonlinebusinesses.com is my website. So you can check me out there and come ask me questions if you have any.

Jeremy Deighan
Perfect. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and just good luck with your business moving forward.

Jaryd Krause
Thanks so much, Jeremy. Great to be here. Thanks.